


(you taught me) the courage of stars

by grumpyhedgehogs



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (you can assume all my works are Pro-Jedi), Abandonment, Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Ahsoka Tano-centric, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Disaster Lineage (Star Wars), Family Bonding, Family Feels, For the most part Obi-Wan is Sir Not Appearing In This Fic, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt Ahsoka Tano, Hurt Obi-Wan Kenobi, Hurt/Comfort, I cannot emphasis enough how much angst is going to be in this fic, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Obi-Wan Kenobi's Terrible Childhood, Obi-Wan Kenobi-centric, Pro-Jedi Order, Protective Ahsoka Tano, Protective Obi-Wan Kenobi, References to the Jedi Council (Star Wars), The Force, War, lineage feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:15:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29046753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grumpyhedgehogs/pseuds/grumpyhedgehogs
Summary: “I know what it is like, Ahsoka.” Obi-Wan tells her. “I know what it is to leave the Jedi with nothing more than the clothes on your back and the knowledge that you are doing the right thing.”Or: Ahsoka Tano flees after a warrant for her arrest is issued, but not before receiving aid from an unexpected ally. (Ahsoka proceeds to go on a road trip filled with a bunch of strangers who all say the same thing: Obi-Wan Kenobi is much more than he has ever appeared to be.)
Relationships: Ahsoka Tano & Everyone, Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Bruck Chun & Obi-Wan Kenobi, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, Cerasi & Obi-Wan Kenobi & Nield, Chewbacca & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Dexter Jettster & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan & Wila Prammi & Elan, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Everyone, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Nield, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ona Nobis, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Quinlan Vos, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Siri Tachi, Obi-Wan Kenobi & The Black Heth
Comments: 37
Kudos: 358





	1. Nautical Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> This idea has been bopping around in my head for a WHILE, y'all. It's basically an amalgamation of my dreadful desire to put Obi-Wan through pain while also giving him some Therapy Because Boy-Howdy Does He Need It and my absolute adoration for Ahsoka Tano. The basic premise of this fic is: What would happen if when Ahsoka left the Order, she went on a road trip through all of the worst hits of Obi-Wan's childhood?
> 
> Bonding. Bonding is what would happen. 
> 
> Title from 'Saturn' by Sleeping At Last.

Ahsoka runs.

Rain sheets down around the togruta, digging into her skin like a million icy knives. Her soaked clothes weigh her down as she sprints blindly, plastered to her, dragging against her limbs. She is chilled to the bone, but not from the storm.

There is no one here to look closely, to separate her tears from the rest of the water obscuring her vision. She takes a turn, breath hitching beneath her ribs as she passes into a tunnel free of rainwater. There is a light at the end, beckoning, promising freedom. She’s almost out. She’s almost free.

She shouldn’t have to worry about being free.

Footsteps sound behind her as she runs, hurrying after her. Panic closes her throat and Ahsoka tilts, stumbling off balance. She throws out a hand, gasping as the Force rises to meet her command, buffeting her back to her feet. If she can just get to the end of the tunnel--

“Ahsoka, wait!”

Ahsoka had been prepared for Skyguy’s voice to ring out behind her. She’d seen the look on his face, knew he’d look for her when she ran. She’d been prepared for law enforcement, or even Master Windu or Koon to come looking for her--someone with experience hunting for Force Signatures on crowded planets. She’d thought she could do this. After all, if she could turn her back on Anakin, what couldn't she do?

Ahsoka hadn’t thought Master Kenobi would come for her.

“Stay back!” The words tear from her throat, scraping it raw. Her lips burn, her eyes burn. She whirls on him, knowing she must look crazed, deranged, animalistic. Good. Let him see what the Order has done to her. “Stay away!”

Further back down the tunnel, Obi-Wan Kenobi raises his hands to shoulder height and plants his feet. His fringe is plastered to his skin too, and his robes and armor drip rainwater steadily to the filthy duracrete below, as if he’d simply bolted after her instead of manning a speeder or taking a transport. His chest heaves in time with Ahsoka’s. Her muscles clench and release, her spine a hot iron rod in her back. The Force whispers in her ears, loud, wanting attention. But Ahsoka pushes it away. It’s hard to hear the Force on Coruscant, sometimes almost painful; there are too many Force Signatures here, and too much turmoil clouding her perception. She can’t let it distract her now.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Ahsoka.” Obi-Wan says. His face twists with the words. Ahsoka wonders if he’s noticed her tears. 

“Don’t come near me. I won’t go back to the Temple.” _You can’t make me_ , she almost continues, but the words can’t be forced from her mouth. She bites her tongue instead, shuffling back, and ignores the tang of blood. The whole thing is almost laughable; in any other situation she’d sound like a petulant teenager. Master Kenobi wants her to go to her room. _You can’t ground me because I’m not part of this family anymore!_

Ahsoka feels sick. She takes another step back. She sees Obi-Wan’s eyes widen. He does not move.

“I’m not trying to take you back to the Temple.”

The words make no sense; they sound like static in her ears. Nerves make Ahsoka snarl at him. It’s a trick, it has to be; the great Negotiator, giving up his prey without a fight, without argument? The Council no doubt sent him after her, and Ahsoka isn’t going to fall for it just because he has a friendly face. They’d have better luck sending Anakin.

“I’m not going to take the fall for something I didn’t do!”

“I am not asking you to,” Obi-Wan replies, and raises his voice over Ahsoka’s incredulous protests as she opens her mouth again, venom on her tongue. “I am asking you to listen to me now because we don't have much time before law enforcement realizes I’ve slipped them and begins searching for both of us. I think one of them might have put a tracker on me, so you’ll need to get as far away from here as possible after we’re done, am I making myself clear?”

_No_ , Ahsoka thinks, mind swirling with questions and accusations, panicked. _You aren’t being clear at all_. “Why did you follow me if--if you’re not going to arrest me?”

“I need to give you this.”

Master Kenobi lowers one hand, his movements stiffly telegraphed, and holds out his open palm. From his damp glove float three items, bright enough to catch the low light but too small to make out in the shadows they stand in; Ahsoka catches them with the Force thoughtlessly, the movement second nature. It’s almost like the old games they used to play in the creche, rolling a ball back and forth with only the Force. She does not look down at what he’s given her, only closes her fists around them and stares. The Force pulses around the objects in her hand, curling around Ahsoka as she inspects Master Kenobi, looking for some reaction, anything to analyze how he's feeling or what he's thinking. But Obi-Wan's not moving, not making any motions towards her. His voice is clear and hard and not unkind. He stands as parade rest and makes sure Ahsoka can see his hands. 

Ahsoka blinks, startled as she realizes that Obi-Wan does not have his lightsaber on him. Not that he isn’t a threat unarmed, but--has he underestimated her? Perhaps he hoped he could manipulate Ahsoka into coming back with him?

Or does he not intend to do anything of the sort?

“The datachip is encrypted,” Obi-Wan tells her like Ahsoka isn’t reeling. He speaks quickly, businesslike, as if he's about to lead Ahsoka into battle rather than--rather than help her run from the law. “But it’s nothing you won’t be able to slice into. I couldn’t get ahold of your sabers, I’m sorry. I wish I could’ve--but there was no time. Do you have a way off planet yet?”

Numb, Ahsoka shakes her head.

Obi-Wan nods and his hair flops with the movement, flicking water down his nose and cheeks. The urge to laugh hysterically bubbles in Ahsoka's chest, but she swallows it. He points over her shoulder, out of the tunnel. “Head to Dex’s diner, in the lower levels. He’ll be able to get you on a ship wherever you want to go. Check the chip if you can't think of somewhere safe. There will be papers waiting for you.”

“You--you’re letting me go?”

His lips twitch into a simulacra of his usual smile. It looks wooden. “Yes.”

“ _Why?_ ”

Anakin wouldn’t do this. Anakin would ask her to stay, implore her not to leave. Does Obi-Wan want her to go? Does he think she really did it--that she hurt their family?

He wants nothing more to do with Ahsoka. He’s throwing her away like day old trash, just like the rest of the Jedi.

There’s a soothing wash of calm in the Force; it emanates from her grandmaster, rolling in waves towards her own nexus of grief and pain and fear. For a moment, Ahsoka lets it wrap around her, a comforting blanket against the cold that has enveloped her for days. Then she comes to her senses and, horrified at her own childishness, shakes it off. Obi-Wan is still smiling that awful, empty smile. “I know what it is like, Ahsoka.” Obi-Wan tells her. “I know what it is to leave the Jedi with nothing more than the clothes on your back and the knowledge that you are doing the right thing.”

Unable to help herself, Ahsoka lashes out, cruelty squirming sickly in her stomach. She wants--she wants Obi-Wan to stop talking, she wants him to feel her devastation, she wants him to see how she is crumbling beneath the weight of what his Council has done to her. “You don’t know _anything_ about what I feel!”

Obi-Wan loses his smile; his face looks strange. It is as if Ahsoka has never quite seen him before. He is old and worn. There is a deep sorrow carved into his skin. His gaze unfocusses for a split second, eyes far away while he looks at her. She shivers; it isn't _Ahsoka_ Obi-Wan sees standing before him. There’s something else there too, down underneath the rest of it, something that makes the lump in her throat triple in size, something she can’t name. The gifts Obi-Wan gave her bite into the skin of her palms, the datachip and whatever its companions are drawing Ahsoka’s blood in the darkness of this tunnel. Escape looms at her back.

“Yes, Ahsoka. I do. Now you must go--flee!”

Ahsoka runs.

As she does, one question burns into Ashoka's mind: if she asked Master Obi-Wan to come with her, would he?


	2. Nautical Twilight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The role of Mr. Exposition-Man will be played by Dexter Jettster.

The transparisteel doors to Dex’s Diner rattle in their frames when Ahsoka slaps her palms against them. The downpour thunders behind her, around her, soaking into her very bones and chilling her to her core. She can barely hear her own heartbeat over the rain. She throws most of her weight behind her next pounding strikes against the doors.  Her lekku drip steadily; her eyes are still watering. Ahsoka can barely breathe--she’s been running, Force enhanced, for what feels like hours. Her lungs burn in her chest. A scream builds in her throat but she snaps her jaws shut against it. “Dex,” Ahsoka shouts instead, “Dex!”

She’s so dazed, so confused by the wind and rain and cold seeping into her skeleton that she doesn’t realize the transparisteel before her has disappeared; Ahsoka’s hand comes down only to meet air and for the second time in a single day, she stumbles, balance lost. Her heel skids in the puddle that has formed around her as she yelled, and Ahsoka reels. Stepping forward rather than throw herself backwards into the street, she only just manages to catch herself against the edge of a table.

There’s only one light on in the whole place, warm yellow glow spilling into the main dining area from the kitchen. The air is still, almost suffocating; nothing moves. Nothing breathes. For a second, her ears ringing, Ahsoka gasps, winded, in a world all her own. The Force curls unpleasantly around the edges of her mind, jerking her spine straight with fear. 

Her breath heaves in her chest as Ahsoka looks up and locks eyes with a vaguely familiar Besalisk. “Help me,” she whispers, hoarse. Goosebumps stand out on her arms. Chills wrack through her.

“Sith hells, little Jedi,” Dexter Jettster says, half-shouting over the rain. The next second the doors slide closed, muffling the downpour. Sidling around the trail of puddles Ahsoka has left in her wake, Dex offers her a hand up. Panic makes her fingers tremble as the padawan takes it. One of Dex’s other hands offers her the dish towel from the man’s own shoulder. Ahsoka takes it and wipes her face; if, perhaps, she wrings a few tears out into the towel before handing it back, well, it was soiled with kitchen grease before she got her hands on it anyway.

With a great effort, Ahsoka looks up and sets her jaw. “I have to get off Coruscant.” 

To his credit, Dex only gapes for a moment. Two hands rise to smooth over a wide forehead as he gestures toward the kitchen entrance. Ahsoka lets herself be herded into the kitchen, where Dex gestures for her to sit at a rough-hewn wood table in the corner. As she slide reluctantly into her seat, wet clothes sticking in uncomfortable places, Dex turns and, without missing a beat, begins rustling pots and pans around. “Why would you come to me for that? Who are you, Jedi?”

“I am  _ not  _ a Jedi.” The words sting her throat.

Sharp eyes slide towards her face before flicking away. “Could’ve fooled me--wait, I know you, don’t I?” No matter the startled expression on her face, Dex steps back, looks her up and down and then snaps his fingers, four times over. “Yes, yes--you’re Kenobi’s whelp’s padawan, aren’t you? He’s shown me holos of you three!”

Ahsoka evades the question altogether. “He sent me to you--Kenobi. He said--”

She barely remembers what her grandmaster--ex-grandmaster--said in that tunnel. Her hearing has to be damaged, or her cognition going wonky, because there’s no way he just--told her where to go, how to run from the law. He did it so  _ easily _ , like he’d prepared to let Ahsoka go a long time ago.

_Maybe he did._ Her stomach turns over. When the Besalisk offers her a plate full of warm food--how long has it been since she’s had more than war rations?--Ahsoka can barely look at it. She takes it anyway; the dishware is warm in her hands, which is enough for her. Her shivers grow stronger.

She almost doesn’t catch the concerned downturn of Dex’s lips before he turns his back. The diner owner huffs airily, moving to the sink as if he let disgraced former padawans hide in his kitchen every day. He lets the silence creep in on them until Ahsoka can barely stand it before speaking over his shoulder to her.

“Oh, well, if Kenobi sent you, that’s fine then. Force knows I owe him one for helping me get out of a scrape or two. It’s only right I do the same for him and his when the time comes. Speaking of which, he left some things--” Dex breaks off and scurries into a back room. Around Dex's broad frame, Ahsoka glimpses an office, folders and files piled up on a dingy desk, cabinets filled to bursting with flimsiplasts of varying sizes. Dex picks his way between the stacks, perfectly at home, and returns holding a file above his head in triumph. Ahsoka nearly jumps out of her skin when he slaps them down in front of her. “Here we are!”

Tentative, Ahsoka opens the files--only to be confronted with her own face. Through the mind numbing confusion, she realizes it’s a Coruscant identification form; one that the Jedi Temple never issued to her. There isn’t any mention of the Temple anywhere on the document as she scans it. Ahsoka flips through the pages only to find another I.D., this one for Naboo--and one for a planet she faintly remembers from her navigation classes, Gala, and one for a place she’s never heard of, Melidaan--there’s even one for the Mandalorian sector, although that one has the most travel restrictions than any of the others.

These documents would allow her to travel almost all over the Inner Rim, and to quite a few places in the Outer Rim to boot. Ahsoka rifles through the papers faster, something great and terrible building in her chest. The dates go back years--almost all the way up to the exact date she was assigned to Skyguy.

“What _ is _ this?”

“Obi-Wan asked me to make them for you. Skywalker’s are in there too; I had to update his more often, of course, because he’s been with Obi-Wan longer.” Dex gives an awkward little laugh and points to the section that does indeed reveal itself to hold documents with Skyguy’s name on them. “Kenobi sent me some pretty cute kid pictures of your Master if you want to see.”

Ahsoka very much does _not_ want to see.

“Why-- _why_ do you have these? Why did _Master Obi-Wan_ ask for _these?”_ She doesn’t realize her grip has tightened on the flimsis until Dex gingerly pulls them from her hands. He smooths them out against the surface of the table before looking up into her eyes. Ahsoka swallows at his deadened expression. 

“Something happened to you.” Dex says lowly. “Something that took you away from the Temple, from the Jedi. You aren’t going back. Yes?”

Mute, Ahsoka nods. That terrible thing inside of her screams and it makes her limbs tremble. The Force swirls and rises around her, her own personal storm. 

Dex, too, nods. He slides her papers back to her and this time, Ahsoka handles them softly. They may be the final gift she ever receives from her grandmaster. “That’s what these are for. They’re your safety net; a way for you to go on without the Jedi. That’s why Obi-Wan asked for them, and why he sent you to me for them tonight.”

The words almost tumbling out of her mouth without permission, Ahsoka blurts, “He said he knew what it was like to leave the Jedi.”

Dex says nothing, shrugs when she eyes him across the table. He and Obi-Wan are close enough that he asked Dex to do this, that he sent Ahsoka to Dex when he knew she had nowhere left to turn--what does Dex know about Obi-Wan that she doesn’t? That Skyguy doesn’t?

_ I trusted Master Obi-Wan because he never seemed like he had anything to hide, _ Ahsoka thinks foggily.  _ How wrong have I really been? _

Ahsoka’s throat closes. When it’s obvious she won’t get a straight answer, Dex sighs and rubs his forehead again. He leans back to survey her, chair groaning beneath his weight. “Kenobi’s pretty tight-lipped about it, kid, but he’s been through a lot. I would know; it’s how we met. He’s Jedi through and through, but the man knows there’s more to life than his Order. He knows that bantha fodder happens even to the best of people. He wanted to make sure that if there were ever a reason for you or his padawan to leave the Jedi, that you would be taken care of.”

“I--I didn’t know.” Ahsoka’s vision blurs yet again; the colors of her own holo on the top document--a travel identification card for Alderaan--smear before her eyes. “I didn’t know--what happened?”

Did Obi-Wan really _not_ reject her only hours before? Did he really know how she felt at this moment, the devastation saturating the very marrow in her bones?

But if he did, why hadn’t he helped Ahsoka when he could have? Why hadn't he stopped all of this from happening to her?

“That’s not my story to tell.” Dex stands, and pushes her plate of food, now grown cold, to her elbow. “Eat, read, take a minute to yourself. And when you’re ready, I’ll have a place on a ship headed off planet ready for you. Do you know where you want to go?”

At her shake of the head, Dex hums. But then she remembers something, and digs in her pocket. She hopes the datachip wasn’t corrupted by all the rain. It seems mostly dry when she finally locates it and sets it out on the table with a small _click_. “Obi-Wan gave me this--said I could use it to find a safe place to go.”

Dex hums again and shuffles back towards his office. “Think I’ve got an old datapad you can use somewhere…”

An hour later Ahsoka huddles in the hold of a cargo ship with a borrowed cloak pulled over her head, a borrowed datapad on her knees and a decrypted list of unfamiliar names and locations in her possession. Obi-Wan’s gifted papers allowed her travel without a hitch, but she’d spied some Coruscant Guards on her way in, and Dex’s parting words ring in her head still.

“Be careful, little Jedi. Caution rules above all else in the underworld, and for now, you’re stuck down here with the rest of us.”


End file.
